Tuesday, January 08, 2013

Over the Christmas period, The Guardian has been has remembering famous people who passed away this year. Unfortunately, Neal Ascherson's piece on Eric Hobsbawn is as obsequious as the obitories at the time of his death in October. Here's what I thought about that, from First Thing's On the Square.

The death of Eric Hobsbawn in October, at a grand old age of
95, has shown the British Left in its worst light.Hobsbawn was a lifelong apologist for some of
the most monstrous crimes in history.For this, the British Establishment welcomed him to its bosom.He was professor and then president at my alma mater of Birkbeck College at the
University of London.Prime Minister
Tony Blair consulted him and advised the Queen to make him a Companion of
Honour in 1998.His death has produced
the predictable deluge of tributes.Labour Party Member of Parliament Tristram Hunt wrote a particularly
oleaginous piece for the London Daily
Telegraph concluding Hobsbawn was “a great scholar and undaunted public
intellectual”.Blair’s successor and the
current leader of the Labour Party, Edward Miliband, mourned the loss of “an
extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics, and a great
friend of my family”.

There are many who argue that Hobsbawn was indeed an
excellent historian.Others might
disagree, believing that historians need to work at the coalface of the
sources, mining information and refining it into new knowledge about the
past.Ironically, for such a defender of
the working class, Hobsbawn rarely went near a coalface, metaphorically or
literally.He was a teacher (by all
accounts, quite a good one) and a synthesiser (again, a good one).

Leaving aside his academic achievements, Hobsbawn should
have been notorious as the last of Stalin’s foot soldiers.He joined the Communist Party in the 1930s
and remained loyal even after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, when
several of his comrades left. While Khrushchev’s
extinction of the Hungarian bid for freedom caused a crisis among British
communists, they had been able to swallow Stalin’s purges and the Nazi/Soviet
pact of 1939.Hobsbawn has a
particularly malodorous record in this respect.He wrote a pamphlet with Raymond Williams defending Stalin’s alliance
with the Nazis, thus destroying at a stroke the justification for their support
of the Soviet Union as a bulwark against fascism.On the purges, Hobsbawn told the Canadian
journalist (and later, politician) Michael Ignatieff in 1994 that they would
have been a price worth paying for the Marxist workers’ paradise.

Eric Hobsbawn wasn’t the only Stalinist to rise high in the
esteem of British academia and society.His fellow traveller, Christopher Hill, was another example.When he died in 2003, also in his 90s, encomiums
filled the newspapers.In Hill’s case
there is now little doubt about his significance as a historian.He was thoroughly second-rate.He did read the primary sources relating to
his favoured period of seventeenth-century England but his reconstructions were
so tendentious that historians of the period no longer take them
seriously.My graduate research
overlapped with Hill’s work on the subject of England’s universities, so I
included a passage refuting his views in my PhD dissertation.My supervisor rebuked me for flogging a dead
horse.

Whereas Hobsbawn thought Stalin’s murders might be justified,
Hill simply denied they ever happened.In a television interview broadcast shortly before his death, he
insisted that he’d been in Russia in the 1930s and had seen no evidence for the
atrocities.And it’s true.He was there.Like many contemporaries on the Left, he enjoyed a carefully supervised
tour of the Soviet Union’s wonderful achievements.When Stalin died in 1953, Hill announced “He
was a very great and penetrating thinker. Humanity not only in Russia but in
all countries will always be deeply in his debt.” The reward for his unwavering
admiration for Uncle Joe was election as Master of Balliol College,
Oxford.

How did these men remain fêted throughout their lives?In large part, a popular misapprehension
about communism saved them from the opprobrium they deserved.Too many people still accept the good
intentions of communists to make the world a better place, even if, in practice,
it all went terribly wrong.This is a
fundamentally flawed analysis.At its
most basic level, communism must crush freedom.It is the forcible merger of the individual into the system.It is not a utopian system that went wrong,
but the antithesis of much that is best about humanity. That the perpetrators of communism’s crimes
thought they were acting for the greater good is no mitigation.In many ways, it made the situation
worse.As CS Lewis observed, “Of all
tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the
most oppressive... those who torment us for our own good will torment us
without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Stalin didn’t take in everyone on the Left, especially once
his crimes were manifest.George Orwell
saw communism for what it was and, in Animal
Farm and 1984, gave us dreadful
illustrations of its true nature.A one-time
comrade of Hill and Hobsbawn, EP Thompson, became a fierce critic of Stalin
while remaining on the hard left. Today, writers like Nick Cohen and Martin
Amis keep alive the tradition of leftwing liberalism.And the Labour Party itself, when in
government, gave no quarter during the Cold War.

So let us hope that, with Hobsbawn’s passing, we will no
longer have to endure sentimental fawning over men like him: Men who can praise
a society which would have packed them off to Siberia with alacrity and where
they surely would not have lived into their nineties.

1 comment:

I was a young Cold Warrior, studying under such freedom-loving historians as Donald Treadgold and Herbert Ellison. I also took classes from a Marxist revolutionary who handed out armbands when one of our fellow students at the University of Washington was killed in Nicaragua, and a radical feminist who took my criticism of communist propaganda as ideologically suspect.

What strikes me (later as author of The Truth Behind the New Atheism) is that, having jetisonned Marxism-Leninism without the fullsome campaigns of repudiation launched against Nazism in every media since, modern skeptics have taken up the "New Atheism" without a backwards glance. Like the rabbit in Narnia that can hear a pin drop a hundred miles away while standing by a great waterfall, they hear the injusticies of the Inquisition as through a megaphone, but have never seriously attended to the Red Holocaust and what it might mean for the moral poses and anti-religious rhetoric one adopts today. Even some historians, it seems, fail to learn much from history, and therefore fail to teach our Yung-uns.

Welcome to Quodlibeta

The Latin word Quodlibeta means "whatever you like" and refers to the special occasions at medieval universities when the students (or clerks as they were known) could test their masters by asking any question they fancied. This blog is primarily concerned with religion, science, history and their interface. But like the medieval clerks, we reserve the right to post on anything we want.

I am a historian of a very middling and amateurish sort. Having taken a Masters in Modern History at the University of St Andrews (2004), I completed a law conversion course at Nottingham Law School and embarked upon what has been an exciting career in legal technology. My chief interests are in Twentieth Century History, Colonial America, Historiography and, most recently, the History of Science. I also write a satirical blog at The Diary of Humphrey Clarke. I hope my contributions to Quodlibeta capture something of the pleasure I get from trawling my dusty collection of second hand history books.

Jim S

I have a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Master's degrees in Philosophy and Theology. I'm a generalist, my areas of expertise being epistemology, logic, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and science and religion. I did my philosophical studies in Continental Europe, and currently reside in the Pacific Northwest. I also write the Agent Intellect blog. In my mid-20s I decided to refute Christianity to set my conscience at ease. Two subjects I turned to in particular were science and philosophy. I accidentally argued myself into it.